State representative, who's challenging Lamar Alexander, says he didn't mean to represent questionnaire answers as his own

Sep. 26, 2013

State Rep. Joe Carr: 'I certainly would never imply that my thoughts or ideas or views are exclusively my own, and I certainly didn't represent them in the questionnaire that way.' / John A. Gillis / File / Gannett Tennessee

Written by

Michael Cass

The Tennessean

Examples of plagiarism

According to an email sent by James Gann, a member of the Coalition for a Constitutional Senate, the following appears both in Heritage Foundation materials and in Rep. Joe Carr’s responses to a candidate questionnaire:

“The purpose of dividing the act of nomination from that of appointment also refutes the permissibility of any statutory restriction on the individuals the President may nominate. The principal concern of the Framers regarding the Appointments Clause, as in many of the other separation of powers provisions of the Constitution, was to ensure accountability while avoiding tyranny.”

From Heritage Foundation materials:

“The policy the FCC is trying to enact is known as “net neutrality,” an unfortunately vague code word for government regulation of the Internet.”

The FCC doesn’t even have the legal authority to enact these regulations. Like any federal agency, the FCC can only issue regulations if Congress delegates it the power to do so.

Though the FCC has the power to regulate telecommunications, it hasn’t been granted the power to regulate the Internet.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC’s attempt to regulate the Internet was outside the scope of its authority. That didn’t stop the FCC, though. It went ahead and issued new regulations anyhow.

From Carr’s questionnaire:

One major example of the abuses of the FCC can be seen back in 2011 when the FCC passed and enacted a policy known as “net neutrality,” an unfortunately vague code word for government regulation of the Internet.

The FCC didn’t even have the legal authority to enact these regulations. Like any other federal agency, the FCC can only issue regulations if Congress delegates the power to do so.

Though the FCC has the power to regulate telecommunications, it hasn’t been granted the power to regulate the Internet.

In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC’s attempt to regulate the Internet was outside the scope of its authority, yet the FCC went ahead and issued new regulations anyways.

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U.S. Senate candidate Joe Carr plagiarized other people’s writings at least four times in his answers to questions from a tea party group working to vet potential challengers to Sen. Lamar Alexander.

Responding to a questionnaire by the Coalition for a Constitutional Senate, which includes more than 60 Tennessee tea party and far-right groups and a political action committee known as Beat Lamar, Carr copied lengthy phrases and complete sentences from four articles on The Heritage Foundation’s website. Coalition member James Gann highlighted the similarities in an email obtained by The Tennessean and other media outlets.

Carr, a Republican state representative from Lascassas in Rutherford County, acknowledged what he had done in a phone interview Wednesday. But he said he didn’t consider it plagiarism.

“When we were crafting our answers, I went to various sources — not just Heritage, but a number of resources — to do the research,” he said. “I certainly would never imply that my thoughts or ideas or views are exclusively my own, and I certainly didn’t represent them in the questionnaire that way.”

But Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing at Turnitin, an Oakland, Calif.-based technology company that checks writing for originality and runs a website called Plagiarism.org, said there’s no doubt Carr committed plagiarism.

“If it’s someone else’s work and it’s not attributed or cited, it’s plagiarism, unless it’s just really common phrasing, like cliches or things that are not original per se,” Harrick said. “If someone appropriates material without citation and presents it as their own thoughts, that constitutes plagiarism.”

Alexander’s campaign, which is expecting a challenge from Carr or another tea party candidate in the Republican primary next summer, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

'It's not an academic work'

Carr, who jumped into the campaign a month ago, said journalists and attorneys told him after the controversy flared up that the copying didn’t constitute plagiarism because “it’s not an academic work that you’re taking credit for, and it’s not a published article you’re getting compensation for.”

He said he had never copied anything without attributing it to the original source in either of those situations, though he wasn’t sure if he had done it or not in previous political questionnaires, which interest groups often send to candidates.

“Quite honestly, it didn’t occur to me,” said Carr, 55. “When I give talks, I reference The Heritage Foundation and all these different groups that I go to do my research and analysis that I need to, I guess, draw evidence to what my worldview is on a particular issue or principle.

“I don’t make any apologies for my answer. I think the only thing I regret is that I didn’t have the foresight to say, ‘You know, here’s a list of sources that I got to illustrate my point of view.’ But it certainly wasn’t intentional.

“There’s nothing in there, quite honestly, that’s uniquely mine. I believe what the Bible says: There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat, saw his 1988 presidential campaign go off the rails when it was discovered that he had quoted a British politician in some of his speeches without attribution.

Carr, a third-term state representative, said he would try to be more clear about the sources of his words in the future.

“I think I’ll be more careful just so I don’t give the appearance of impropriety, because I think that’s important,” he said. “And to the extent that somebody believes my conduct here, even though I don’t believe it was, was inappropriate, I think the appearance here might be something I would pay a little closer attention to in the future.